Sized Nation-Potism/Bloodlines Print

I am a multimedia Cuban artist working across media, materials, and scales, from small collage to large art installations. I am a painter, sculptor, and photographer and use any of those in my work. I grew up in the second oldest part of the city of Havana, Cuba, three blocks from Havana Bay and the broad seawall stretching for 5 miles along the coast from old Havana to the new. From San Francisco, to Atlanta and many cities in between have been my home, and also Europe for several months and for a while the countryside in South Central Appalachia. Crafting narratives that exist in the uncanny space between facts and fiction and using old and new materials I make artworks with unpredictable stories half revealed that are imbued with history. I explore the dynamics of power relations, social constructs, fragmentation, transgressions, migrations and myths. Central to this is the weight of memory shaping the nonlinear continuity of history and geography, people and places. My process is to allow stories to surface, to propose ways in which we mutate perspectives and see with new eyes allowing for the openness of alternative readings to emerge. From unexpected sources new works are created and official narratives are re-examined, enhanced, or dismantled. I am attracted to hybridity, the forgotten history, the anonymous image, the found object. Also religious symbol, intuitive gesture, and text. During a process of recombining, the unexpected becomes visible in a multiplicity of works which involve research and planning but also allows for preconceived ideas to give way to flux, chance, and non-permanence. The element of time that has passed is evident in the quality of used or manipulated materials. In other works new materials are used and objects specifically created. My work can be precise and clean, visceral, rustic, minimal or baroque, where imperfection is embraced and flourishes, and the mark of life on everything touched that has history and meaning emerges to be a witness. As each work evolves the medium, forms, and materials find their place in a process that always attracts new ideas to be investigated and new bodies of work to be created. Latin America Modernism, Literature, African Art, Arte Povera, The Russian Avant-Garde, world religions, California assemblage, Native American pottery are some of the things that have influenced and guided my work.